FACULTY OF BUSINESS STUDIES DEPARTMENT OF MANAGEMENT
Sébastien POIRIE
Recruitment and social media in an international environment: How
social media have impacted international recruitment?
Master’s Thesis in International Business
I. Introduction ... 1
1.1 Study background ... 1
1.2 Research question and objectives ... 4
1.3 Limitations of the study... 5
II. Literature review ... 6
2. Recruitment and selection ... 6
2.1 Recruitment process and selection ... 7
2.2 Recruitment Process Outsourcing ... 10
3. Brand image and recruitment ... 14
3.1 Employer branding ... 14
3.2 Employer branding and recruitment ... 16
3.3 Employer branding and outsourcing ... 17
4. Social media ... 19
4.1 What is social media? ... 19
4.2 Importance of social media in recruitment and international recruitment ... 21
4.3 Social media and brand image ... 23
4.4 Social media and recruitment ... 26
III. Method ... 31
Research purpose and strategy ... 31
Data collection... 34
Data sample and overview of the case company... 35
Summary of the data sample ... 37
Structure of the interviews ... 40
Data analysis ... 42
Reliability and validity ... 42
Ethics of the research ... 45
IV. Findings ... 47
Recruitment process ... 47
Social media and its impact on recruitment ... 49
International recruitment and social media ... 53
V. Discussion ... 56
VI. Conclusion ... 61
6.1 Theoretical contribution ... 61
6.2 International recruitment and social media ... 62
6.3 Limitations ... 63
6.4 Suggestions for future research ... 64
VII. References ... 65
Faculty of Business Studies
Author: Sebastien Poirie
Topic of the thesis: Main title: Recruitment and social media in an international environment
Degree: Master of Science in Economics and Business Administration
Master’s Programme: International Business Supervisor: Vesa Suutari
Year of entering the University: 2017 Year of completing the thesis: 2018
Number of pages: 77
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ABSTRACT:
The study examines what impact social medias have on international recruitment and how professionals from recruiting agency and corporate human resource management adapted to those new tools. The empirical part of this study was conducted using qualitative research method. Semi-structured interviews were conducted among 12 interviewees, among them were 5 managers or directors and 7 senior employees of four companies, two recruiting agencies and two corporate companies, the company are all Europe based. In the study deductive approach was used and the data was analysed to better understand how social media impacted the international recruitment.
The study reveals that social media have impacted recruitment in many ways, especially in the research and selection process of potential candidates. An interesting finding shows that current HR professionals did not really notice the change of recruitment over time. They all agree on the fact that social media made their job easier but did not notice the change. Additionally, social media brought new challenges to recruitment such as the difference of language between a recruiter and a candidate.
This study covers the gap between recruitment and social media literature by providing concrete data that show how social media and recruitment can impact each other. This study adds value to the existing literature by providing data from companies and professionals directly impacted by social media in their daily recruitment activities. Future research can rely on these data to broaden their understanding of how recruiters are using social media in recruitment.
______________________________________________________________________ KEY WORDS: Recruitment, International recruitment, Social media, Candidate sourcing, Human resource management, International
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I.
Introduction
This chapter aims to introduce the topic of the study. The chapter will start with the presentation of the study background before moving on to the justification of the research. Then the research question and the objectives of the study will be presented. Finally, this chapter will talk about the delimitation of the study and introduce the literature review and the research design.
1.1Study background
In the last fifteen years, recruitment has changed. The development of new tools and the expansion of the internet in people’s life made it easier to connect to each other. Therefore, companies started to adapt to this new reality and found new ways to attract candidates and connect with them. Social networks are one of those new tools used by recruitment teams nowadays but that didn’t exist twenty years ago.
When Anderson (International Journal of Selection and Assessment Vol.11(2‐3), pp.121-136, 2003) talked about the new tools available for recruiters to select and interview candidates, he put his finger on a very important point: to what point is it relevant in recruitment to use the available technology? In the past decade or so, the world has seen the emergence of social media, at first personal social network, it is now used on professional purpose with tools like LinkedIn, Viadeo or different data base full of CVs.
Those new social networks changed the way recruiters recruit, select the candidates and it created new biases even before the candidate is met in person by the recruiter. (Ralf Caers and Vanessa Castelyns, 2011). But they also brought new opportunities to companies. Recruitment agency would have access even more easily to candidates and corporate firms would be able to create a strong link directly with their customers via those platforms, and therefore attract new talents.
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With the development of social media and new communication means, the companies had to adapt and find efficient ways to use those new available tools. Those media can be seen as an opportunity to amplify the role of HR professionals allowing better employer branding strategy, development of skills or even make managers more involved within the sourcing process. (Aurélie Girard, Bernard Fallery, Florence Rodhain, 2014). The use of those social networks is not the same if it is viewed from a corporate recruiting perspective or from a recruiting agency perspective. A company which is not specialized into recruitment will be more likely to use social media to strengthen their employer branding to attract new talents. Employer branding in the context of recruitment is “the package of psychological, economic, and functional benefits that potential employees associate with employment with a particular company.” (Wilden, Ralf ; Gudergan, Siegfried ; Lings, Ian, 2010). On the contrary, recruiting agencies are more likely to use those social media to search and find exactly the different talent they need among the millions of profiles available online.
The studies that have been conducted so far cover how social media are used and influence our life, but no study truly focus on how social media are used by company to recruit. Therefore, it is interesting to analyse and understand the power of social media in a society always more and more connected.
Most of the studies conducted only focus on how a brand could or should use social media to strengthen their position on the market but few of them concentrate on how those same tools have changed the way we recruit in an always more international and global context. The apparition of social network gave a new dimension to the way companies are working and organizing themselves to compete in an international context. Everything goes faster and further thanks to the high connectivity available today. This has changed the way businesses are run and social media is now even taught in business college. The study of McHaney, Warkentin, Sachs, Pope, Ormond, 2015) shows the importance of understanding social media to succeed in business.
Lewin and Volberda (2003) argue that a very few firms had developed an efficient way to recruit people (sourcing and managing human resources globally). Nowadays, 65% of adult are using social network (Andrew Perrin, 2015) and firms have adapted to use it in
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efficient way to manage businesses. Indeed, the use of social media today is so common that users have ‘to compete for attention and influence by relying on other people to spread their message.” (Romero, Galuba, Sitaram Asur, Bernardo A. Huberman, 2011).
When it comes to international recruitment, social media are used to attract the best candidates concepts such as employer branding, reputation or image and employment brand, that will be discussed later in this thesis, play an important role and are often linked to the image of the employer (Gatewood, Gowan & Lautenshlager, 1993). Though, due to the fact international recruitment is a new concept, only a few studies talk about employer branding in an international context (Lundby, Wayne & Macey, 2012). Indeed, most of those studies focus on a population of job seekers mainly composed of student or focus on comparing category of job seekers to see what aspects of the employer branding are valued the most by the different categories (Franca & Pahor 2012). However, the population of international job seeker is not appearing a lot in the different studies of employer branding and its impact on international recruitment. Studies related to employer branding focus mainly on the perception employees have about their employer and how a strong employer brand helps to retain the most valuable employees. (Franca & Pahor, 2012).
Studies on recruitment companies show that their role is different than the employer’s role. Indeed, those companies see their responsibilities changing depending on their mission. Their role can be to focus on recruiting an employee for a final employer or have a more important role with helping this employee to relocate or provide them with housing solution. When those recruitment companies are hiring for themselves in order to lease those employees to other companies, they are called staffing agencies. Nevertheless, both, staffing and recruiting companies, are usually the first contact the candidates have. Hiring someone from the country the company is operating and hiring someone from a different country implies different process. International recruitment involves a multi-dimensional and more complex organization than national recruitment. Therefore, it is interesting to study how recruiting agency and corporate companies are operating to attract and hire those international profile with the help of social media.
4 1.2Research question and objectives
This research will address the research gaps mentioned before and focuses on establishing a better understanding of how social media are used by companies to help them attract and retain the best possible candidate in an international context. The main focus will be on what differences exist between corporate employer and recruitment agency in their use of social media to engage with candidates. The focus will be on how social media became more and more important for companies in the last decade and how those companies made their process evolve to best use those new technology. Also, the focus will be on the differences of use between corporate employer and recruiting agency.
The fact that social media have spread so much over the past decade raise the interrogation of how much and in which way those same communication systems are influencing the way recruitment work.
In this research, the main approach would be to compare how recruitment agency and corporate recruitment of multinational companies are using social media in their R&S strategy and what are their expectation.
The purpose of this research is to establish in what extent social media have influenced or are still influencing the way companies think about international recruitment today. The fact that social networks open the possibility to access data from people from anywhere in the world instantly is a very powerful tool for recruiters. Recruitment agencies have always been sourcing and approaching candidate in a direct way to offer them a position while most corporate companies were establishing well define recruitment process from the application they were receiving directly.
Today, it appears that most of those companies are using employer branding on social media to attract new applicants. The interesting part is that most companies said they “had to” start working and be active on social media if they wanted to survive and get the most talented people for their firms.
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In that extent, the purpose of this study is to show how social medias have impacted the recruitment, whether it is from recruiting agency or corporate companies.
To narrow this study, the research will be articulated around the research question: • How social medias have influenced international recruitment?
The theorical part will allow to compare and confront different point on view on different aspect of recruitment. In a first place, it is important to have a precise understanding of what are the difference of recruitment between corporate firms and recruiting agency. The corporate recruitment is directly link to all the recruitment handled internally by companies without asking any external help. Recruiting agencies are specialised agency that help corporate business with their difficult recruitment or the ones that a company doesn’t want to deal with.
With that in mind, it is interesting to study the difference between the recruitment process of those two types of firm and then compare them and ask to professional of the sector if social medias have changed something in that process.
Asking professional from HR/recruitment department will help to complete the theory and have a deeper understanding of how social medias are used and how much they have impacted the recruitment. Therefore, it is important to interview senior manager in recruitment who were active before 2005 and the creation of most social media, then their analyse will bring a real value to this study.
1.3Limitations of the study
This study focuses on recruitment and selection; therefore, all aspect of Human Resource management will not be studied and any change in the Human Resources Management system of a company due to social media will be left out of the study (except if those changes are also implemented in other companies and is impacting recruitment process a lot). The data collected will come from different sources. First the theoretical part is based
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on sources coming from different period of time, preferably after 1990 to keep relatively up to date data.
Data for this study also come from interviews conducted with Recruitment professional who were active in the field before 2005 so a before/after social media comparison can be made. The fact that those interviews might be difficult to obtain is a limitation itself since the amount of interview conducted may not be representative of the entire recruitment industry.
To complete this source of information, secondary data can be used to have a better understanding of what social media represent in term of numbers. This will help to support the fact that nowadays, it is highly difficult to not say impossible to avoid those social networks.
II.
Literature review
The literature studied in this research focuses on the changes observed in recruitment in the past decade. The choice of focusing on those changes allows to analyse and understand if those changes can be imputed to social media or not. The theory that needs to be confirmed is that social media have impacted recruitment to the point that it changed the different processes and way of doing recruitment in the past decade.
2. Recruitment and selection
Every organisation needs people to exist. Those people will determine the success or the failure of a company depending on their capacity to develop the business and use their competencies towards the success of the firm.
This chapter discusses recruitment and selection as the thesis focuses on recruitment in international context. First the process of recruitment and selection is defined and discussed before introducing outsourced recruitment.
7 2.1Recruitment process and selection
Edwin Flippo describes recruitment as “the process of searching for prospective employees and stimulating them to apply for jobs in the organization.” According to Flippo, it is by stimulating candidates to apply that a company might be able to find the right person with the right skill.
In their definition, DeCenzo and Robbins say that “Recruitment is the process of discovering potential candidates for actual or anticipated organizational vacancies. Or from another perspective, it is a linking activity—bringing together those with jobs to fill and those seeking jobs.” This includes the perspective of anticipation, therefore a company is not only looking for stimulating potential employees to apply but anticipating what kinds of position will be available to get more time and attract the right candidate. But this aspect of finding the right person with the right skills is best defined by Plumbley and his view of recruitment as “a matching process [where] the capacities and inclinations of the candidates have to be matched against the demand and rewards inherent in each job or career pattern.”
Recruitment is a multi-stage process used by companies to target candidates (Barber, 1998). Barber’s definition (1998) states that “recruitment includes those practices, and activities carried on by the organization with the primary purpose of identifying and attracting potential employees. In agreement with the other definitions, Barber (1998) argues that recruitment activities serve the purpose of finding and persuading candidates to seek and obtain employment within an organization.
Barber continues by defining recruitment as an organizational function that relies on its capability to connect and convince potential candidates. In Barber’s definition, the two main players in recruitment are the organization looking to recruit a new employee and the candidate. In between those two main players are different individuals, belonging or not to the company, that are in charge or the recruitment by assuming different functions within the process.
If Flippo describes recruitment as “the process of searching for prospective employees and stimulating them to apply for jobs in the organization.”, Barber (1998) highlight how attracting process serves both quantitative and qualitative dimensions. Indeed, it is
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important for the organization to make sure that applying candidates are in a sufficient amount, neither too many or too few and with the right skills.
The simple fact of attracting talent is not enough to make sure they are the right one. Therefore, within the recruitment process, there is a complete part dedicated to selecting the right candidates.
This process is called selection and is defined by Yoder as “the process by which candidates for employment are divided into two classes those who will be offered employment and those who will not”.
As mentioned before, for dividing those candidates into two different categories, the company hiring someone must go through establishing a “system of functions and devices adopted for the purpose of ascertaining whether or not candidate possess the qualifications called for [this] specific job”. (Jucious).
For Decenzo & Robbins, the selection process “follow a standard pattern, beginning with an initial screening interview and concluding with final employment decision.”
Beardwell and Claydon (2007) stated that the terms recruitment and selection are linked and simultaneous as well as those terms are interchangeable for Barber (1998).
For Beardwell and Claydon (2007), the difference between recruitment and selection is that recruitment can be defined as a positive process aiming to create a group of potentially suitable candidates when selection is a negative process narrowing this same group by applying the different criteria helping the company to choose the applicants matching their expectations. Therefore, according to Beardwell and Claydon (2007), recruitment is meant to attract applicant and selection is meant to identify the best ones among them.
The complete process of recruitment is divided into different stages leading to finding the new employee for the company. On this point, Beardwell and Claydon (2007) have a slightly different definition than Barber (1998). Indeed, for the first ones, the process of recruitment is divided into four important phases that are the definition of the vacancy, the attraction of potential candidates, the assessment of those candidate and making the final decision. For Barber (1998), the recruitment process is a bit different as it is first to generate application from potential candidates before trying to maintain those applicants
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interested in the vacancy and finally trying to convince the selected one to accept the job offer.
Barber’s definition, as it focuses on attracting and persuading the candidates, endorse a communication aspect that is more relevant for this thesis purpose. Indeed, generating and maintaining candidates interested in the job offer is truly interesting to the purpose of this research as it is related to communication with applicants.
From a companies’ point of view, recruitment is the entire process of filling a job opportunity by attracting and choosing from the company or from outside, the most suitable person for the current position or for the future positions. But recruitment is not only one sided, if the company or organization can decide whether a candidate is suitable or not, the same candidate can choose if the company would be right for his career or personal life.
Rynes (1991) proposed that a candidate, at the beginning of the recruitment process, have only a very few information regarding the position they are applying for and therefore are more likely to base their choice to apply or not, on general impressions of organizational attractiveness.
According to Barber (1998), at this early stage of the process, attracting candidates, both parties, the company and the potential applicants, possess little information about each other and are trying to widen their possibility by attracting more candidates when it comes to the company and applying to more companies when it comes to the applicants. On a company perspective, if attracting candidates is a key feature of the first stage of recruitment, Barber also highlights the importance for those potential candidates not to be too many as it would increase the workload of the company and potentially reduce the quality with which those applications are processed by the company. Therefore, to be efficient, recruitment must attract the right number of qualified applicants who match the expectation of the organization.
In the second phase, Barber states that both parties are looking for more information about each other and are establishing interpersonal between employees of the company and the applicants. As mentioned before, the goal of the second phase is, for the company to
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maintain candidates’ interest and, for the applicant to narrow their list of potential employers (Barber, 1998).
For Barber, this second phase is represented by significant interactions between recruiters and applicants. Those interactions can take place in different forms such as initial face-to-face interview or longer interview within the company building. According to Barber, the first face-to-face contact with the applicants is important for the company in the process of attraction as the first impressions from the candidates about the employees of the company might be difficult to change later in the process.
Another study shows that at an early stage of job choice decision, the image of the brand perceived by the candidate, plays a major role. (Shanley 1990).Therefore, more than the position itself, a candidate will decide to apply or not depending on his perception of the company. It means that with two equal job positions in two different companies, a candidate can decide to apply only for one if he doesn’t have a good perception of the other organization.
In this section, the most important information to retain is that on the first two stages of recruitment, the communication between the candidates and the company evolves from a cold, distant and impersonal communication to a more personalized and face to face interviews. In the next section, the focus is mainly on the recruitment process outsourcing used by companies to externalize the recruitment activities. This process of outsourcing recruitment will be reduced to recruiting agency in this thesis.
2.2Recruitment Process Outsourcing
Outsourcing is defined as “the act of obtaining semi-finished products, finished products or services from an outside company if these activities were traditionally performed internally” (Dolgui and Proth, 2013).
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Recruitment finds itself among the most outsourced service from human resources in different countries. There are several reasons for that. In her research, Mary P. Hampton (2011) is listing four different reasons to use outsourcing recruitment.
Among them is the fact that a company wants to conduct a confidential search. Indeed, the external provider can source and interview candidates without quoting the name of the company that is hiring.
The second reason is that the company must fill a complicated role. Outsourcing this kind of position allows to widen the database and rely on experience that might be lacking in the recruiting company. Indeed, the external provider usually hires experts in different field to ensure finding the best possible candidates.
The third reason is to face sudden and temporary needs in recruiting volume. In their study, Siew-Chen and S. and Vinayan, G (2016) showed that when a company faces a new challenge in recruitment, they can decide to outsource a part or the complete recruitment process. To illustrate their statement, they took the case of a company operation in the energy sector in Malaysia.
The company was facing a strong need for additional skilled workers and decided to outsource the sourcing part of the recruitment. To successfully implement this solution, the company analysed their need and chose the outsourcing solution for different reasons such as the fact that a mass hiring would increase on a significant manner the amount of work of the human resource team. This would lead to extra cost for the company since the human resource team can be focused on recruitment only instead of other tasks. Therefore, the decision to outsource would allow the human resource team to continue their normal task and benefit from the external provider experience to identify and select the best candidates quicker than if the process was handled internally.
The fourth reason is when a firm considers increasing their staff. According to Hampton (2011), this happens when a company wants to increase the size of the recruitment team but needs to analyse if the work load justifies this hiring.
12 2.2.2 Different way to outsource?
The different needs for outsourcing the recruitment implies that a firm will not always use the same external provider to fill a role. The expertise required for a confidential search is certainly different from the skills needed to handle a mass recruitment.
Mary P. Hampton (2011) listed three different type of recruiting agencies: retained search firms; contingency firms and contract recruiters. Each of these specializations has their benefit and drawbacks. The author listed different advantages and disadvantages. According to her, it is possible to associate a kind of agencies with a kind of recruitment.
Then, retained agencies are more likely to fit recruitment situations in which it is hard to fill role or for non-disclosure agreement search as they offer more individualized services. They target more specifically as their database is more likely to be oriented in a specific field. Though they are performing better in targeted recruitment and therefore offers a good quality service for specific role or executive level positions.
When it comes to contingency firms, their existing and wide database allows quick recruitment when the skills needed are common.
Finally, the contract recruiters are recruiters from an external provider coming on site to work for the hiring company. It is a good way for the company to see if the workload on specific tasks is worth hiring a new employee.
According to Siew-Chen and Vinayan, G. (2016), a truly important part of outsourcing the recruitment process is to plan and define carefully how the execution of the process will take place. From the case of the firm in Malaysia, one can understand the importance of planning and getting involved in the recruitment process to keep control and insure the targets set previously are reached Indeed, a well-defined process is easier to monitor.
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2.2.3 The advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing recruitment
As stated before, outsourcing recruitment allows the human resource team to benefit from the external provider’s expertise. It also implies that the companies outsourcing their process will gain access to a larger talent pool (the one from the external provider) and therefore increase the chance to find the right candidate. Moreover, the company that outsources its recruitment will see its employees able to focus on their key responsibilities instead of using valuable time in screening hundreds of candidates.
A big advantage of outsourcing recruitment is the fact to be able to choose what kind of agencies will handle the search. Moreover, the fact that the recruitment process itself can be split is a true benefit for the human resource team that can handle only the operational part of the recruitment.
According to Mary P. Hampton (2011), outsourcing recruitment can have important drawbacks when it comes to the cost of the external provider (between 20 and 50% of the candidate’s first-year salary). Also, some more specific disadvantages can appear depending on the type of agencies. For example, a contingency firm can be less regarding on sending the very best candidates as they get paid when the position is filled. So, a contingency agency can send more CV to increase the chances to fill the role, and by doing so increase the workload of the human resource team in charge of sorting the profile sent by the external provider.
This section shows how outsourcing recruitment can help companies to be more efficient by saving time to their teams and counting on the support of experts in the field they want to recruit. Though, outsourcing recruitment can also have an impact, positive or negative on how a candidate will perceive a company. Therefore, the next section will focus on brand image and how important it is for recruitment.
14 3. Brand image and recruitment
How a customer perceives a brand is an important part of the buying decision. According to Keller (1993) and Aaker (1996), a brand with a strong image is more likely to see its products or services purchased than a company with a less strong brand image.
Brand image can be defined as the different associations a customer has towards a brand (Keller, 1993), on two levels: material and emotional associations (Zembik, 2015). Those associations take different forms and can relate to thoughts, perceptions, feelings and beliefs a customer gets towards a specific brand. Those associations are linked to the past the customer had with the brand as well as what he knows about the brand itself and form the bases of what brand image this customer will get. (Keller, 1993)
When it comes to recruitment, the employer image is as important as the brand image for marketing. It is called employer branding.
3.1Employer branding
Ambler and Barrow (1996) define “the employer brand [as] the package of functional, economic and psychological benefits provided by employment, and identified with the employing company.” The Conference Board (2001) gave a similar definition: “the employer brand establishes the identity of the firm as an employer. It encompasses the firm’s value system, policies and behaviours toward the objectives of attracting, motivating, and retaining the firm’s current and potential employees”
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Employer branding can be described as what makes a firm or organization different from its competitors as an employer. What unique benefits or career perspective an employee get by working for this or this brand. When it comes to attracting the best candidates for a position, the strongest the employer image, the better because a strong employer brand allows the brand to vehiculate an image of great place to work (Edwards, 2010)
The employer, by developing its brand, wants to build a positive image and distinguish itself from its competitors by offering a unique value proposition that potential candidates can see as attractive and valuable (Ambler and Barrow, 1996).
Building a strong employer branding starts with developing the “value proposition” that is demonstrated within and by the brand through the firm’s culture, style of management or what are the specific values offered by the company to its employees (Sullivan, 2002). Once this value proposition is well defined, the company needs to vehiculate it to attract the targeted candidate. It is truly important that the employer brand is reflecting and concurring with all the other branding campaign and effort made by the brand. (Sullivan, 1999). Once the value proposition is well marketed outside the firm, the company should make sure this value proposition becomes part the its culture (Frook, 2001). Therefore, the company can develop a workforce devoted and willing to spread and share the values set by the firm.
A good example of how a company tries to develop a strong employer brand is McDonald France and its TV advertising campaign to promote how the company value its employees by giving them a lot of career evolution perspective. For example, a person hired to work in the kitchen can become a manager and then director of a restaurant within a decade and then get a degree recognized by the French government to be equivalent to a university degree.
McDonald France ends the advertisement (2008) by saying “McDonald does not conceive to hire someone and not train him; therefore, each employee gets a proper training that gives him career perspective at McDonald’s or in other companies”. By saying so, the
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company vehiculate a positive employer branding and does not impact negatively its brand image and its motto “come as you are”.
3.2Employer branding and recruitment
Backhaus and Tikoo (2004), define in their study, employer branding as “the “process of building an identifiable and unique employer identity, and the employer brand as a concept of the firm that differentiates it from its competitors”. They compare the brand equity based on customer and the employer brand equity. The first one is related to the impact a brand knowledge has on a customer’s purchase intentions of a product if he has a choice with an unbranded one. The second is related to the effect the name of the brand has on the employees or potential employees.
They state that employer branding is divided into three distinct steps. In the first stage, the company must develop a value proposition showing and selling the benefits offered by the firm. The second step is to share this proposition to the potential employees. Finally, the firm should fulfil this value proposition by implementing the right process internally. Their thoughts are complementing the ones of Sullivan (1999) and Frook (2001) cited before.
Moreover, having well defined and clear recruitment activities is more likely to attract more and better candidates (Han and Collins, 2004). Their study about how a company’s recruitment strategy influences the employer brand equity and therefore the intentions of the candidate to apply, shows that brand awareness is an important factor when it comes to influence a job decision.
As a matter of fact, to consider applying for a company, a candidate should know that this company exists as an employer (Collins and Stevens 2002). In their study, Collins and Stevens highlighted that activities related to recruitment advertising such as sponsorship, advertisement or word of mouth have a positive impact over the applicant or job seeker’s attitude towards the firm.
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Moreover, knowing a company is a prerequire for an individual to form an opinion towards it (Lemmink, Schuifjf and Streukens 2003). Their research showed that being familiar with an organization influence on a positive manner the intention of a candidate to apply.
In their research, Gatewood, Gowan and Lautenschlager (1993) examined if the potential candidates for a job had a recruitment image from the company and if yes, what would be the dimensions of this image. They define the recruitment image as being a function of information vehiculated through the recruitment campaign. Indeed, being exposed to information is an important part of someone’s perception of image. Their findings show that the more the message is exposed to information, the better the image is enhanced and therefore has positive outcomes on the future employment. This means how strongly the choice of a job is correlated to the image of the firm.
A good brand image has some advantages for an organization and its recruitment. Some of the advantage are the possibilities to attract better and more candidates for a job position (Fombrun and Shanley 1990). This was also discussed in the research from Turban and Cable (2003) who argue that a positive image of a company would help increasing the attractivity of this firm and therefore result in a bigger amount of applicants in the talent pool.
Widen (2010) examined the nature and outcomes of employer branding. The results show that a company that invests more in the development and the maintenance of vehiculating image of being an employer that cares about employee development, or actively manage it presence on the different website or business magazine as well as being part of different alumni network and offer internships to students is likely to create the perception that this company is a great place to work because it cares about its employees.
3.3Employer branding and outsourcing
A strong employer branding, as seen before, can create a positive attitude and feelings from the candidate toward the company. Therefore, a candidate is more likely to apply and be positive about the recruitment process of an organization with strong employer
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image than one with a weaker brand image. (Aaker, 1996; Keller, 1993). This works for companies that are hiring for themselves, but nowadays, most of the companies are outsourcing their recruitment process for some positions. In their research, Wehner, Giardini and Rüdiger Kabst (2014) show that both, company image and the service provider image can improve (or reduce) the attractiveness of the hiring company as well as the satisfaction of the applicants. They also suggest that an applicant is more likely to see a well-known service provider with more experience and professionalism than a less known one. Therefore, a company cooperating with a well know service provider will improve the perception candidate have about the quality of the recruitment process. Outsourcing the complete recruitment process also have negative impact for the company’s image on the applicant. In their research, Wehner and colleagues (2014) also suggest that companies that only outsource some parts of the process, like advertising and preselection, can still influence in a positive way the evaluation of the different applicants. Companies with strong band image that cooperate with well-known service provider can soften, if not override the negative effect of outsourcing their recruitment process in a certain extent. Indeed, according to the same study, the applicants will answer negatively to an employer that would not take part in the interviews process (telephone or face to face).
This highlights the importance of choosing the agency that will oversee the recruitment process. But the most important is how well the relationship with the third-party recruiter will be handled. To better succeed in managing this relationship, there are few steps that can help such as finding flexible agencies, customizing the agreement signed with those agencies, setting clear and well defined expectations and defining the way the agency will source and select the candidates (so the firm don’t pay double if a candidate is found via a source for which the company is already paying). (Hampton (2011)).
19 4. Social media
As stated before, in the recent years employer branding became an important part in a brand strategy to keep competitive advantages on other brands from the same market. To attract the best candidates but also the young talented ones from all over the world, a brand needs to focus its effort on the communication to communicate through the different interface those young talents use nowadays: recruitment website and social media (Eger, L., Mičík, M., & Řehoř, (2018)).
4.1What is social media?
Social media is a term that can relate to many different subjects, but the most basic definition is given by Osborne-Gowey (2011) who defines social media on its most basic level as “a collection of websites and applications designed to build and enhance online communities for networking and sharing information”.
In their study, the authors state that “Social media is composed of easily accessible web tools through which people converse, participate, create, recommend, valorify information and respond online to everything that happens around them”. They describe social media as a complex term split in two distinct words. First, “social” which refers to the different interactions that can happen within a group or community. Second, media, which is used to describe everything that leads to the diffusion or transmission of information through different channels/platforms. Therefore, the term social media is used to describe “communication platforms generated and sustained by interpersonal interaction of people, using specific methods or procedures” (Onete, Cristian Bogdan; Dina, Razvan; Negoi, Remus, 2011).
Moreover, according to the same study, social medias are characterized by different criteria. The participation is one of them as everyone interested in the topic is invited to discuss and share his/her opinion about it. The second aspect is the openness. Indeed, since the opinion of anyone is welcome, it is important that everyone can access the same data and information to exchange about it.
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Unlike traditional media, social media is about conversation and therefore based on a two-way conversation with the participants where traditional medias are based on one-two-way communication (diffusing a content to an audience without asking them to participate). This new way of displaying information is based on the ability of social media to generate and grow rapidly different communities that can communicate and share opinions or information effectively. Those communications among communities are made easier by the fact that social media are interconnected and allow the audience to include links to other website to sustain their thoughts.
There are hundreds of thousands of so called social media on the internet and trying to make a general statement is vain. Though, when it comes to recruitment, it is possible to focus on the websites allowing communication directly with the targeted audience in a professional/personal way. To better understand what social media is and how it can be used by company, analysing the most famous ones seems to be the logical thing to do.
If you ask basically anyone about social media, it is most likely you will get an answer containing the word “Facebook” and that is because the platform launched in 2004 is one of the best example of what is social media. On this platform, someone who set up a Facebook profile can accept or delete a friend. Every time a friend is accepted into the user's network, he can see all the photo, videos and posts of this person. Andrews (2012). Andrews pushes the definition of social media a bit further and gives a more social perspective by saying that people can belong to virtual communities where they can talk and share points of view based on common interest such as hobbies, education or news event.
In 2018, Facebook has over 2.20 billion monthly active users (Facebook MAUs) and 13 percent increase year after year. (Source: Facebook 04/25/18). This means people are connecting over the world and exchanging information at an incredible rate but also that social medias are too big to ignore.
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TABLE 1 “Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide” (2018)
4.2Importance of social media in recruitment and international recruitment
As the statistics showed previously, social media are too big to be ignored and therefore occupy an important place in nowadays generation. According to Lipscomb, in 2010, 60% of the generation Y, including all the people born between 1977 and 1997, have joined a social media. According to the same author and based on the declaration of Nielsen Global group, in 2010, Forrester Research interviewed 1217 business decision makers around the world and stated that 95% of them were using social network on some levels.
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Lipscomb (2010) goes further by saying that the new generations are using the internet as an exclusive source of information and are fleeing from the other traditional ones such as radio, newspaper and television. Not only people are able to engage conversation with anyone about subject that are interesting for both parties but also those people are more willing to engage in a conversation as their “do not disturb shields are lowered.
When it comes to the importance of social media in the business world, Ciprian Pavel (2015) said that the right question is not if a business should use social media but how they should use it to better serve their purpose. In other words, social media plays a very important part in today’s business industry, especially in marketing and communication. Moreover, social medias opened new ways for companies to interact with their customers. (Kumar et.al, 2016).
As seen with Facebook, the number of users on social media is gigantic and it makes total sense that companies are using them to attract or bound with their customers to increase their loyalty. In a report (2010), Regus showed that on all the companies using social network worldwide, 40% of them use it to attract new business. Communicating with contact or communicating with customers is the main goal for 51% while 58% enjoy social media to gather information helping in business intelligence.
Another study conducted by InSites Consulting (2011) about European users of social networks showed that 50% of them are connected to brands. But more interesting is the fact that users are more than just connected as some are commenting on a brand page (36%) and even more are communicating with the brand on a dialogue form (42%). Also, this study reveals that 53% users react to comment from the brand and 51% are just consulting information.
When it comes to recruitment and international recruitment, traditional methods can becomequickly an expensive investment. Indeed, method like organizing recruiting fairs in other countries can be costly and limit the opportunities to keeping contact with potential candidates after the event. If a firm starts to use social media to reach international candidates, they save money on the direct cost that can represent travel and registration fee, but also indirect cost caused by the fact that an employee present at the
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event won’t be available at the office on that day. (Madia, 2011:20; Gibbs et al., 2015:172) Even if social media implies cost related to time and skills, the cost related to use them is low. (Ford et al. 2011).
Moreover, the global presence of social media like Facebook or LinkedIn (Statista 2018) make them ideal tools to customize messages and targeted communication towards different nationalities as the language preferences can be set in different language.
Some research show how recruitment through social media is used in the recruitment process. In 2011, the SHRM survey highlighted that 95% of HR professionals declared using Linkedin, 58% Facebook and 42% twitter for recruitment purpose. This survey indicates that recruitment through social media is involved in all kind of position, from non-management position to management. Moreover, 30% of the HR professionals using social media in recruitment, declare using the information they find about the candidate to reject their application. On a brand perspective, having so many people on social media means that users are more likely to react to their content than trying to start a conversation. But it also means that everything happening on social media is measurable and that habits can be identified quickly and efficiently based on precise criteria. The next subchapter will focus on the importance of brand image on social media.
4.3Social media and brand image
In 2016, the number of worldwide social media users was 2.34 billion and is believed to keep raising (Statista, 2017). As seen previously, social media are too big to be ignored and brands need to get involved on them. But they also must carefully manage the way they communicate on social media (Schivinski & Dabrowski, 2016) as through those new means of communication give the consumers power over a brand’s success. (Zembik, 2015).
An important aspect of social media and recruiting through them is that the content is highly visible. It is then truly important for companies to make sure their image revealed on social media match with their recruitment strategy. At the same time, potential
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candidates and current employees must manage their online image and their relations with their employment status. (Ladkin and Buhalis, 2016:335).
Brecht et al., (2011) determined that companies must be very careful when choose on which social media they want to use. They suggested that the choice must be done to best target the group they want to address. They continue by stating that a company targeting young people (students and graduates), should develop its activity on private social network site like Facebook as most young people are active users of private social network site.
The main features of social media are the openness, the participation and the sharing of information. As seen before, social medias are online environment where users can express, exchange and share their opinions or experiences. This ability to reach customers directly and interact with them made many organizations change the way they communicate. Indeed, giving personal advice is an effective way of getting the attention of customers meanwhile trying to influence their attitude towards the firm. (Park, Rodgers and Stemmie, 2011).
The different social medias a brand can use to communicate are countless, though few names are more famous than others. In that extent, social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Instagram have the favour of many companies when it comes to share their content. Those different platforms enhance the bound and the communication between the companies and their customers (Kim & Ko, 2012; Killian & McManus, 2015).
The content posted on social media by a brand is called firm generated content and is a complete part of the marketing strategy of the firm on social medias. (Kumar et.al, 2016). This firm generated content is playing an important part on what image and what perception a customer gets from a brand (Kim and Ko, 2012).
The content posted by brand is also evolving, Waters & Jones (2011) found that videos posted on YouTube by companies to inform and educate are used as much as the one posted to entertain. They showed that unlike the text based conversations that are an efficient way to develop and build a brand reputation, combining a visual element with words can enhance the brand’s identity in a significant manner. The fact that the video, and therefore the link on which the video is hosted, can be shared and tracked on the
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different social media bring to the company many ways of developing and shaping it’s key message. Social medias also allow brands to reach targets they couldn’t reach before and surpassed in that extant the traditional medias (Keller, 2009).
When a company decides to take part on a social media, it should engage the dialogue with the different people following it. By engaging the conversation, the company will be able to understand the behaviour, way of thinking and feelings of its customers. Social networks make conversations easier and even encourage them. If used properly the online community can bond together but also bond with the brand itself. (Szmigin, Carrigan, and Reppel, 2005).
It is important for a company to increase the interactions with its applicants since it would benefit both the company and the candidates. The candidates are able to get in touch with the company, present themselves before applying and get involved in the application process. For the company, it allows to get more applications and get a first impression of the potential employees (Brecht, Koroleva and Guenther; 2011).
Social media are also used by users to form an opinion over a company. Some social networks or ratings portals offer to applicants a possibility to get more information on a potential employer’s working practice and culture. Therefore, relying only on its website or career brochure is not sufficient enough anymore as new generations of candidates are looking for more personal reviews, be it from former or current employees from this company (Laick and Dean, 2010).
Bondarouk, Ruel and Weekout (2012) examined the role played by websites on the relationships between the attractivity of a company and employer branding. They investigated if it makes a difference for a company to use their websites and social media (LinkedIn) to strengthen their employer branding. The findings suggest a direct relation between a company’s attractivity and employer branding. They also found that the relationship is strengthened by exposure through corporate websites. Though, corporate website and social network sites are not significantly different. One explanation for that is that the research focuses on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is more about connecting business together and not to interact directly with candidate on the employer branding. If the study had focused on a social media like Facebook, it could have maybe changed the results as
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the purpose of this social network is to connect and share information. However, the effect of social media remains unrevealed.
To sum up, it is important to say that to use social media on an effective manner, recruiters must implement specific recruitment strategies proper to each social network (Hunt, 2010), but also clearly define their audience (current employees or future employees).
4.4Social media and recruitment
The internet makes the hiring process a lot easier for job seekers and for the hiring company (Borstorff et al., 2005; Walker et al., 2011). Indeed, the internet opened new ways of communicating, especially in the fields of sharing information and advertisement, and social medias play a big part in it.
Due to those new channels, the companies started to think differently on how to attract new talent. Traditional way of recruiting, such as advertising in newspapers, co-optation and the internet are still used, it is also common to see advertisement of job opening on the internet, for the companies, this lower the cost of candidate selection (Cappelli, 2001).
Using social media for recruitment presents several positive aspects. The first advantage of using social media for recruitment would be the incredible ability to reach instantly millions of people for a relatively low cost. The fact that everything happens online allows companies to save a lot of money on prints or personal mailing. Moreover, social media are used as a personal resource for many users, which means a company can reach the users (potential candidates) anywhere and anytime even during holiday period or outside business hours. (Andrews, 2012).
This means for recruiters that they can contact a potential candidate privately without picking up a phone. And this means for the potential candidate that he or she will have time to answer when the time suits him/her best. Therefore, social media can be a good way to generate referrals (Smith and Kidder, 2010)
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But it also means that with the push of a button, a job description can be published on several social media and is available to hundreds of candidates within minutes. In that extent, social medias possess a considerable advantage over traditional printed medias as they allow to develop the recruitment strategy at the same time as marketing, communication, customer relation and internal communications (Madia, 2011:20)
Another positive aspect of social medias is the fact they are seen as a reliable source of information by recruiters and candidates and offer accessibility and convenience to the users (Andrews, 2012). Indeed, social media are accessible as the only condition is to have an internet connection. Most of those social media are also available through application one can have on his phone, tablet or laptop. Moreover, those applications allow the users to download easily a lot of data about themselves. This accessibility of social media makes it easier to recruit on a global scale rather than a local or national one.
In recruitment, a social media like LinkedIn enables the users to download all the information concerning their professional life, from their university path to their professional career. LinkedIn is a social media launched in 2003 that counts around 467 million users worldwide and is available in 24 languages. (Statista, 2018). As the other social media, LinkedIn has seen its community growing over the years at a fast pace as shown on this graphic.
28 TABLE 2: Number of LinkedIn users (2018)
Another interesting statistic about LinkedIn is that the number of users using the application on their mobile is increasing as well to reach 62 million in 2016 (as shown on the TABLE 3).
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TABLE 3: Mobile unique visiting members to LinkedIn (2018)
Those data confirm that users of social media tend to use it from anywhere and through personal object such as their own phone.
Another important point of social media according to Ms Andrews, is the interactivity. Indeed, as stated before, social media are based on a conversation mode and brands should engage the dialogue with their customers. When it comes to recruitment, this allows the recruiter to interact directly with the potential candidates and answer their question in a fast an efficient way. A job description becomes a way to start a conversation for the candidate rather than an obstacle to his application because of some points he didn’t understand.
Backhaus (2004) analysed the description of the companies appearing on monster.com (a job portal) and found that in most cases most companies fail to differentiate themselves from one another and therefore implies that the strategy to promote a good employer branding has not been successful.
Companies are not the only ones finding advantages of using social media as a recruitment tool. Studies show that candidates prefer interactive and engaging method
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from companies to receive information (Barron, 2008). Furthermore, the opportunity given to candidates to market themselves and advertise their resume globally for no cost is a clear advantage of social media (Ladkin and Buhalis, 2016). The ability given to the candidate to create an online presence with all the needed information for a recruiter to assess if he can be or not a good applicant is a perk for candidates but can be a point of vigilance for companies as some studies revealed that applicants tend to fake or falsify their data on applications (Levashina, 2009).
If the use of social media in recruitment can be a clear advantage, studies also show some potential drawbacks to this method. As stated before, some candidates tend to falsify their information on social media, and this can lead to legal or ethical issues regarding the relevance and reliability of data collected from social media (Slovensky and Ross, 2011; Smith and Kidder, 2010; Taleo Business Edition, 2010).
When someone creates a social media profile, it is usually for personal reasons and for interacting with his or her friends. This means that some information uncovered by recruiters might be personal and not related to work at all and affect recruiters. This can be seen as a negative aspect by the profile owner as it can be a violation of privacy from the recruiter (Slovensky and Ross, 2011).
Companies relying importantly on social media to get information and to recruit their future employee might take the risk of not reaching every group of applicants (groups based on demographic criteria) and therefore make the chance for those people to get hired, uneven (Taleo Business Edition, 2010).
As seen in this section, social media have advantages and disadvantages when it comes to recruitment. The impact of social media on recruitment is more and more important as more people start using them. Some studies suggest that recruitment process is more and more affected by social media and that recruiters should take it into considerations for recruiting. (Petre, Stegerean, Gavrea, 2017).
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III.
Method
In this section, the subject and the strategy of the research will be discussed. A part will be granted to the explanation of the method with which data have been collected and on what sample. At last, reliability and validity if the research will be presented.
Research purpose and strategy
Conducting a study, writing a dissertation or doing a research implies to use the most appropriate methods and approaches to develop and explain the different objectives of the study.
There are commonly three different ways to conduct a research: exploratory, descriptive, and explanatory.
- Exploratory approach aims to explain a phenomenon and its process with answering the question: "what is happening?”. Using this method will allow to better understand a problem. To conduct an exploratory research, one can choose among several options: reviewing literature, interviewing experts on the subject people involved one way or another in the subject researched.
- Descriptive research aims to describe a situation. Describing the case makes it possible to establish a clear picture of the situation.
- Explanatory approach aims to go through the problem with establishing connections, analysing links or cause-to-effect situation.
A combination of all the method described above is possible (Saunders, Lewis & Thornhill 2009).
In the case of this research, the method chosen is exploratory and a bit explanatory. Exploratory because the study aims to explain the behaviour of HR professionals related to social media, but also because the goal of this thesis is to explain the impact social media had on recruitment by interviewing different actors of HR.
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Furthermore, this research seeks to explain the link between social media and recruitment focusing on how social media influence recruiters, or the impact of recruiting tools on the relationship between recruiters and candidates, but also variables and factors in favour of a long-term relationship with a candidate, which gives to this study an explanatory approach.
To clarify the research approach, it aims to explain how the theoretical framework is used in academic study. There are different approaches, two to be exact: the inductive approach and the deductive approach.
An inductive approach is mainly used in qualitative research due to its flexibility. This approach helps to better understand the nature, formation and meaning of the object of the study.
A deductive approach is less flexible, with a better structure and is more likely to be used for quantitative study. Results obtained through a deductive approach can be generalized.
Moreover, a deductive approach based its thinking on already existing literature to explain the theory and formulate hypothesis. Once the results are obtained, they will confirm or not the pre-established theories.
When it comes to an inductive approach, the data are first obtained, and then the theory is explained and analysed.
Most of studies are not only one or the other. It is indeed very rare for a study to be completely inductive or deductive and most studies are both.
The deductive approach will be used in this study because models to explain the attitude and behaviour of HR professional towards social media do not exist yet. Therefore, data will first be collected from HR professionals and then analysed to understand how social media influenced the way they’re doing recruitment.
When it comes to data, there are two types of research data, quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative data are data based on a numerical system. Therefore, after collection of those data, the analysis and the exploitation consist into describing, comparing and explaining those data and explain what factors is most relevant regarding which other factor.
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Quantitative approach is more appropriate when the data are easily measurable and when tools like measurement scales can be used. Those data can easily be compared between each other thanks to those tools (Ghauri & Gronhaug, 2005). Often, after comparing the data, it is common to use graphs and statistics to helps with the analysis (Saunders et al.).
A qualitative approach is an approach that is not based on numbers but rather on words and declarations. Therefore, data are collected thanks to questionnaires that help conducting open-ended questions or in-depth interviews.
This paper is using a qualitative approach. This is justified by the fact that HR professional must explain the way they work with social media in order to better apprehend the methods and correlation that exist between the development of social media and their use in recruitment. Those data would be hard to transcribe into numbers and therefore the use of a qualitative approach seems more appropriate. Indeed, there is a need to observe if there is a correlation between the fast growth of social media and their use in recruitment by HR professionals.
To have a clear understanding of how social media are used in companies as different as recruiting agency and corporate companies, the research will be based on a case study. The case study approach allows to collect precise data from a well define sample that matches the phenomenon debated in the study. Through this small sample, it is then possible to study the different chosen vectors throughout the groups studied and obtain an in depth understanding of the situation.
Using a case study in this research is appropriate because the case studies groups of individuals who are all using social media in a different way. Therefore, thanks to the case study, it will be possible to compare and highlight the similitude and differences between individuals but also between companies. The possibility to emphasis a feeling of an individual or a more general impression among the groups is a great asset to understand how HR professionals react to social media and how they’ve been influence by those in their work.
